Author Archive - Cristina Lavecchia, Editor

Cristina is an editor and researcher at First Reference. She is a licensed paralegal and obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree, Political Science major at York University. During Cristina's paralegal and undergraduate studies she studied employment standards, occupational health and safety, and workplace safety and insurance. Read more

The Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Alberta has required a payment processing organization to notify individuals pursuant to section 37.1 of the province’s Personal Information Protection Act because there was a real risk of significant harm to those individuals affected by an incident that involved unauthorized access and theft of information of 60 Alberta residents.

The holidays are quickly approaching. However, leading to that point of unwinding can be stressful for many business owners, with the balancing of family demands and workplace year–end pressures. Regardless of such amounting pressures, businesses should not neglect their responsibilities to employees and clients before closing for the holidays.

The task of picking up the phone, dialing and anticipating a “hello” on the other end can be daunting for many people. Text messaging, compared to phone calls, has dominated the way we communicate with one another over the years. With the abundance of text messages exchanged between people, there stems an important question with respect to privacy. That is, is there a reasonable expectation of privacy in a text message once it has been sent and received by the intended recipient? The Ontario Court of Appeal recently concluded that there is not. Thereby ruling that text messages seized from a recipient’s phone can be used against the sender in court.

Many of us have called service providers to change basic information, such as a mailing address. You pick up the phone, speak to a representative, and the change is made; no big deal, right? This seamless scenario may not always be the case. Any little misstep on an organization’s part can cause grief not only for the customer, but also for the organization itself. This proved to be true when an employee complained, to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, that her employment pension and benefit provider disclosed her personal information to a third party without her consent.

On March 22, 2016, the new Liberal Government’s first federal budget, Growing the Middle Class (“Budget 2016”), was tabled. Budget 2016 focuses on growing the economy, creating jobs, and strengthening the middle class.

In light of the Canada Revenue Agency’s (CRA) annual report revealing that there has been a significant increase in the number of Canadians coming forward to correct their tax affairs under the Voluntary Disclosures Program (VDP), we wanted to give some insight into what the VDP is about. Essentially, the VDP gives a taxpayer a […]